Steve Jankowski’s Master Thesis (Wikipedia and Encyclopaedism: A genre analysis of epistemological values Click Here!) is proof that a supervisor (me) can learn more from his student than the student from his supervisor. And I’m not speaking here about learning some interesting facts or methodological tricks. When reading the final version of the thesis, I truly learned about new, relevant and important ideas pertaining to digital humanities and post-colonial epistemology.
The main theme of Jankowski’s work is the “epistemological conservatism” of Wikipedia. This conservatism can be seen in two important features of this encyclopedia: its categorization system and its general theory of knowledge.
First, based on rigorous scientific methodology, this groundbreaking research shows that the paratextual headings of the famous online encyclopedia are very close to those of the 19th century Britannica. Since headings and disciplines form the meta-data system of the encyclopedia, or its chief categorization apparatus, we can say safely that it is one of the place where its tacit epistemology is hiding.
Second, based on a thorough historical study of the encyclopedic genre, Jankowski shows that the theory of knowledge officially followed by Wikipedia is also the theory of knowledge stemming form the movement of enlightenment and developed by modern Europe in the 19th century. According to this general framework, there is an “objective” scientific truth, that is produced by the scientific community according to its own academic rules (the primary sources) and a vulgarization of this objective truth by the writers and editors of the encyclopedia. Vulgarization is understood here as a kind of synthetic compendium of scientific knowledge for the “cultivated public” (meaning in fact: people having at least a secondary education).
These two discoveries are important for several reasons.
Wikipedia is one of the most consulted sites of the Internet and it is the first place where journalists, students and professors alike, go to find some basic information on any subject. This means that any epistemological bias in Wikipedia has more influence on the contemporary public mind than those exerted by the news outlets. A deeper influence, indeed, because Wikipedia is not only about facts, news or events but also about the basic structure of knowledge.
The idea that Wikipedia is epistemologically conservative may be counter-intuitive for many. Is not Wikipedia completely open and free? Don’t we know that anybody may write and edit this encyclopedia and that the editing process itself is transparent? Isn’t Wikipedia a fantastic example of international collective intelligence and one of the big successes of crowd-sourcing? Of course! But the big lesson of Jankowski’s work is that all this is not enough. There are still some emancipatory efforts to be made.
Wikipedia has opened new grounds by using hyper-textual tools, a crowd-sourced editorial process and an open intellectual property. These are all good and each should be pursued to further develop collective intelligence in online environments. But Wikipedia also contains within its DNA the typographic epistemology and the categorization system of good old colonial Great Britain.
In an increasingly data-centric society, when mastery of knowledge is the main asset of cultural, economic and military power, epistemology is key to the new politics. In this regard, Jankowski implicitly asks us two strategic questions. How can we build an organic and unified compendium of knowledge allowing as many categorization systems as possible? How can we integrate the different point of views on a given subject in a perspectivist way instead of imposing a “neutrality” or “objectivity” that reflects inevitably the dominating consensus? These sort of questions address epistemology’s crucial role in the new politics and within personal and collective identities.
Interesting stuff! You (& Steven) might be interested in a proposal for a distributed wiki-architecture to support “Every Point of View”, as opposed to neutral point of view on the grounds that the latter is epistemologically nonsensical, see e.g. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2013/February#.22Distributed_Wiki.22_proposal_to_replace_NPOV_with_.22every_point_of_view_.28EPOV.29.22
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Bull shit. The key sentence is “How can we build an organic and unified compendium of knowledge allowing as many categorization systems as possible?” = False question trick.
First, the answer is allready in hypertext and crowd-sourced editorial process. And anyways it’s a work in progress: If you have a better idea, just do it.
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Coarse language, contempt for open and argumented discussion, shortsightedness. Plus: it shows that you never tried to solve the problem. By the way, I have a better idea https://pierrelevyblog.com/my-research-in-a-nutshell/ and I will do it.
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Wikipedia fails, and will always fail, the semantic interoperability problem.
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For your information, we are discussing this blog entry, and Jankowski’s paper, at the Wikipedia criticism site Wikipediocracy.
http://wikipediocracy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2346
Also, I have to take issue with your evaluation of Wikipedia. Making epistemological judgments, not to mention quality judgments, on Wikipedia is greatly complicated by the fact that it is run by teenaged boys and a motley gang of crazy people, not to mention paid editors pushing a point of view that is pretty far from “neutral”. If it resembles Britannica in organization, that is primarily due to the presence of educated people in various subject fields, who actually wrote the good content. We have found that those people are leaving Wikipedia, being replaced by arrogant young men who often know nothing about most academic subjects, but who treat Wikipedia as their private “playground”. Wikipedia today is more of a wargame and a magnet for crazy people than it is a “reference work”.
And Wikipedia’s “category” system is a joke, when you examine it closely. The Wikipedia “gnomes” are constantly, obsessively reorganizing and recategorizing material, doing things and then undoing them, like a bunch of mad robots chewing up newsprint. So as a result, the category system is somewhat less than “optimum” or “trustworthy”.
How do I know this? I’m co-writing a book about the history and development of Wikipedia. And the material we’ve found doesn’t bode well for its users, nor for its future. We keep our notes for the book on a private wiki (yes, MediaWiki does have good, legitimate applications, I simply don’t think Wikipedia is one of them):
http://www.logicmuseum.com/x/index.php?title=Main_Page
You and Mr. Jankowski are welcome to come over to the Wikipediocracy forum. The regulars there will tell you things about Wikipedia that will either amuse or horrify you. In fact, I daresay that Jankowski might have to revise his paper after he sees some of the darker revelations.
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I would be curious if you already checked out Wikidata. We have put a lot of effort into not falling into some of the obvious epistemological traps, but I would like to understand where we indeed still fail, and will fail, and what we can do about it.
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Thank you very much. I did not know Wikidata. Now, I have to study it!
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Any thoughts on Wikidata, post-inspection?
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Close, but no cigar!
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Quite interesting indeed. I’m working myself on Wikipedia epistemological stances, but from a diachronic viewpoint: how wikipedian knowledge norms and practices have evolved since 2001? From what I could see, numerous options have been attempted before relying on the “citation needed” approach. Imho, it was a practical rather than an ideological choice: putting academic sources ahead proved the best way to counter countless arguments on controversial topics.
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I’d like to see the power in Wikipedia more in the mass usage of its content than in the quality of articles. This quality is not a real objective in Wikipedia – articles are built on the consensus among editors and this is the main effect they have to achieve. So the idea of knowledge promoted in a society by the Wikipedia effect can be seen as an idea of agreement for the basic facts and the consent on a language of description, developed during the sometimes very arduous process of editing. Of course there is another question how people see Wikipedia and how they treat and use the knowledge they’re given.
Thesis about “enlightenment” model of knowledge can be rejected by the fact that in theory none of the Wikipedia’s articles can be really closed and finished. They are still open for discussion and correction, they are always incomplete – old ideas of traditional encyclopedia emphasized the role of a closed model. By buying encyclopedia you could get a finished product with a closed and locked pack of knowledge. Try to do the same by using Wikipedia, it is always open and unfinished. Wikipedia is a never ending process.
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You are missing the point. It is true that Wikipedia is “open” and unfinished. But I’m speaking of something else: the *categorization* system, the separation between primary (“scientific”) sources and vulgarization, the pretense to neutrality.
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so… is this an example of a primitive Democratic epistemology? of course is bad considering the level of deep thought most we lack of, but… is it evolving? or progressing? one is getting rid of the unworthy ( as in natural species selection) the other doesn’t care if it’s going backwards or forward. PO
rogress just doesn’t care, just… goes
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[…] le domaine du travail collaboratif et de la diffusion des connaissances. Mais faut-il pour autant imiter Wikipedia pour des projets et dans des contextes bien différents de celui de l’encyclopédie en ligne? On […]
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[…] le domaine du travail collaboratif et de la diffusion des connaissances. Mais faut-il pour autant imiter Wikipedia pour des projets et dans des contextes bien différents de celui de l’encyclopédie en ligne? On […]
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I’m amazed, I have to admit. Seldom do I come across a
blog that’s equally educative and amusing, and without a doubt, you’ve hit the nail on the head.
The problem is an issue that too few people are speaking intelligently about.
I’m very happy I found this during my hunt for something regarding this.
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[…] dynamiques auto-organisateurs. Alors que Wikipedia conserve un système de catégorisation hérité de l’épistémè typographique, une bibliothèque encyclopédique perspectiviste s’ouvrira à tous les systèmes de […]
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in-memory database
An Epistemological Critique of Wikipedia | Pierre Levy’s Blog
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[…] An Epistemological Critique of Wikipedia. Summary by Steve’s supervisor, Pierre Lévy, who asks “How can we integrate the different point of views on a given subject in a perspectivist way instead of imposing a “neutrality” or “objectivity” that reflects inevitably the dominating consensus?” […]
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[…] l’historien des sciences, les catégories qui structurent Wikipédia disent quelque chose de la vision qu’a l’encyclopédie de ce qu’est ou de ce que devrait être la connaissance. Pour le sociologue, il est intéressant […]
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[…] l’historien des sciences, les catégories qui structurent Wikipédia disent quelque chose de la vision qu’a l’encyclopédie de ce qu’est ou de ce que devrait être la connaissance. Pour le sociologue, il est intéressant […]
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[…] LEVY, Pierre. « An Epistemological Critique of Wikipedia ». Pierre Levy’s Blog (27 mai 2013). [En ligne]https://pierrelevyblog.com/2013/05/27/an-epistemological-critique-of-wikipedia/. […]
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